Methods and systems for generating enhanced thumbnails usable for document navigation

ABSTRACT

A thumbnail is generated by generating a thumbnail of an original document, generating at least one selectable element, and associating the at least one selectable element with the thumbnail in a display of the thumbnail. By selecting one of the selectable elements in the thumbnail, a document or document portion linked to the selectable element can be directly accessed.

CROSS REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATIONS

This non-provisional application is related to co-pendingnon-provisional applications by the same inventors, entitled “METHODSAND SYSTEMS FOR GENERATING ENHANCED THUMBNAILS”, “METHODS AND SYSTEMSFOR TRANSITITIONING BETWEEN THUMBNAILS AND DOCUMENTS BASED UPONTHUMBNAIL APPEARANCE” and “METHODS AND SYSTEMS FOR DOCUMENT NAVIGATIONUSING ENHANCED THUMBNAILS”, all filed on even date herewith andidentified by Ser. Nos. 09/682,229, 09/682,231 and 09/682,230,respectively.

BACKGROUND OF INVENTION

1. Field of Invention

This invention relates to a method and systems for document navigationusing enhanced thumbnails.

2. Description of Related Art

Computer users spend a significant amount of time examining collectionsof documents, such as documents retrieved by a search engine from theInternet. The user must page through lists of documents, brieflyevaluating each for possible relevance to a particular information need.Improving the efficiency of this tedious process would directly benefitthe end-user and, by improving end-user satisfaction, would indirectlybenefit parties such as the search engine vendor.

For instance, the Internet search engine can increase user efficiency by(1) returning higher-quality document lists (e.g., through better indexcoverage and ranking algorithms) or by (2) providing information thatallows the user to evaluate the results more quickly and accurately.Search engine vendors attack both problems. The standard practice withregard to approach (2) is to provide brief textual summaries of the Webdocuments. In recent years, in addition to textual summaries ofdocuments, it has been suggested that graphical summaries of thedocuments, such as thumbnail images, can greatly increase the efficiencyby which end-users process search engine result sets.

Each of these approaches has advantages and disadvantages. For example,text summaries are terse but are verbal rather than visual. They requirelittle storage space and can therefore be downloaded quickly.Additionally, text summaries often contain a great deal of valuableinformation about each document. For example, search engines commonlyprovide the document's URL, header, size, and a few phrases or sentencesthat either summarize the document or emphasize some of the searchkeywords. On the other hand, text summaries do not provide muchinformation about the page layout or any image contained in the page.Furthermore, the user must read the text summary, which is timeconsuming and tiring.

In contrast, graphical summaries do provide information about thelayout, genre, and style of the page. If the user has previously seenthe page, or one like it, the visual representation may aid inrecognizing or classifying it. This becomes even more compelling in viewof the fact that the human visual system can process images more quicklythan text. Graphical information can speed many tasks tremendously.However, thumbnails typically require more storage space than textsummaries, and therefore, they generally download more slowly than textsummaries. Further, textual content in plain thumbnails is lessaccessible than that in text summaries, as it is difficult to read andis not conveniently summarized.

Previous work includes several different designs for thumbnails. Anumber of programs generate plain thumbnails. These include manygraphical editors, recent versions of Microsoft Windows, and systemsdescribed by Hightower et al. (Hightower, R., Ring, L., Helfman, J.,Bederson, B., & Hollan, J. (1998), Graphical Multiscale Web Histories: AStudy of PadPrints, Proceedings of Hypertext '98, 58-65), among others.Thumbnails of Ayers et al. (Ayers, E., & Stasko, J. (1995), UsingGraphic History in Browsing the World Wide Web, Proceedings of the 4thInternational World Wide Web Conference) are similar to plainthumbnails, showing a reduced view of the upper left corner of adocument.

Other programs generate more complex thumbnails. Cockburn et al.(Cockburn, A., Greenberg, S., McKenzie, B., Jasonsmith, M., & Kaasten,S. (1999), WebView: A Graphical Aid for Revisiting Web Pages,Proceedings of OZCHI'99, Australian Conference on Human ComputerInteraction) generate thumbnails that show reduced images plus dogearsthat indicate bookmarked and frequently visited pages. Helfman (Helfman,J. I. (1999), Mandala: An Architecture for Using Images to Access andOrganize Web Information, Proceedings of Visual '99, Visual Informationand Information Systems, Third International Conference, 163-170)selects representative images from a document and creates reduced scaleimages of these to serve as a thumbnail for that document. Wynblatt etal. (Web Page Caricatures: Multimedia Summaries for WWW Documents; IEEE;1998) produce Web page caricatures. These caricatures contain selectfeatures of a page, often rendered in an abstract form, such as theheader, a representative image, the number of images, an abstract, etc.However, these caricatures do not preserve layout and lack some of thevisual information that might be naturally available in a reduced scaleimage of the page. For example, rather than having the user judge linkdensity, or the number of links on a Web page from an image of the page,this link density is represented by the background color of thecaricature.

SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION

The systems and methods according to this invention generate thumbnailswith selectable elements that allow a user to directly view a part of anoriginal document or another document associated with the selectableelements.

In embodiments, the invention generates a thumbnail by generating areduced-size representation of an original document, the originaldocument having at least one first selectable element, each at least onefirst selectable element having, as an associated destination, one of(a) an arbitrary portion of the original document accessible byselection of a second selectable element provided in the originaldocument and (b) a document other than the original document; generatingat least one second selectable element, each at least one secondselectable element corresponding to an associated destination of one ofthe at least one first selectable element; and associating the at leastone second selectable element with the reduced-size representation in adisplay of the reduced-size representation, whereby the one of (a) theone of the document areas and (b) the associated destination of the oneof the at least one first selectable element is directly accessible byselection of the one of the at least one second selectable element.

In embodiments, the invention generates a thumbnail by generating areduced-size representation of an original document, the originaldocument having a plurality of document portions, smaller than theoriginal document and not uniquely associated with any first selectableelement provided in the original document, the reduced-sizerepresentation having at least one element with a modified appearancerelative to an appearance of a corresponding element in the originaldocument; generating at least one second selectable element, each secondselectable element corresponding to one of the plurality of documentportions, each at least one second selectable element having, as anassociated destination, one of the plurality of document portions; andassociating the at least one second selectable element with thereduced-size representation in a display of the reduced-sizerepresentation, whereby the one of the document portions is directlyaccessible by selection of the one of the at least one second selectableelement.

These and other objects, advantages and salient features of theinvention are described in or apparent from the following description ofexemplary embodiments.

BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE DRAWINGS

The invention is described in detail with regard to the followingfigures, wherein like numbers reference like elements, and wherein:

FIG. 1 is a block diagram showing an exemplary embodiment of an enhancedthumbnail generating system;

FIG. 2 is a block diagram showing one exemplary embodiment of anenhanced thumbnail generator in the enhanced thumbnail generating systemof FIG. 1;

FIG. 3 shows a plain thumbnail of a document;

FIG. 4 show an exemplary thumbnail enhanced with a document formatmodification;

FIG. 5 shows an exemplary thumbnail enhanced with document format andimage modifications;

FIG. 6 shows an enhanced thumbnail applied to an e-commerce genreexample;

FIG. 7 shows an enhanced thumbnail applied to a news genre example;

FIG. 8 shows an enhanced thumbnail applied to a homepage genre example;

FIG. 9 shows a plain thumbnail of a text page;

FIG. 10 shows an enhanced thumbnail of the text page shown in FIG. 9;

FIG. 11 is a flowchart illustrating an exemplary method for generatingthumbnails;

FIG. 12 is an example of an original document;

FIG. 13 is an example of a thumbnail associated with the document shownin FIG. 12;

FIG. 14 is an example of a document version generated based on thethumbnail image shown in FIG. 13;

FIG. 15 is a flowchart illustrating a first exemplary method fordisplaying a document;

FIG. 16 is flowchart illustrating a second exemplary method fordisplaying a document;

FIG. 17 is an example of a document displayed using a click-throughprocedure;

FIG. 18 is a flowchart illustrating an exemplary method for implementinga click-through display procedure; and

FIGS. 19-31 each show a different example of a thumbnail enhancement.

DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF PREFERRED EMBODIMENTS

Enhanced thumbnails according to this invention increase user efficiencyby allowing the user to grasp document content without having to viewthe entire document. This is done by modifying the appearance of one ormore features of the thumbnail image such that the resulting thumbnailprovides better cues to aid the user in identifying or classifying theunderlying document.

As used herein, “thumbnail” typically refers to a reduced-size imageassociated with a document or other electronic data, but may also referto any reduced-size representation that at least partially preserves apage layout of an original document, and may encompass any reduced-sizerepresentation of a document or other electronic data. For example, thereduced-size representation may be an image generated based on thedocument, or may be a reduced version of the document that retains adocument format of the document, or may be a hybrid representationincluding both image characteristics and document formatcharacteristics.

FIG. 1 shows a diagram of one exemplary embodiment of an enhancedthumbnail generating system according to this invention. As shown inFIG. 1, a data source 100 and a data sink 300 are connected to anenhanced thumbnail system 200 over links 110 and 310, respectively. Thedata source 100 can be a locally or remotely located computer, ascanner, or any other known or later developed device that is capable ofgenerating data, such as documents. The data source 100 may also be adata carrier, such as a magnetic storage disk, CD-ROM or the like.Similarly, the data source 100 can be any suitable device that storesand/or transmits electronic document data, such as a client or a serverof a network, or the Internet, and especially the World Wide Web, andnews groups. The link 110 can be any known or later developed device orsystem for connecting the data source 100 to the enhanced thumbnailgenerator 200, including a direct cable connection, a connection over awide area network or local area network, a connection over an intranet,a connection over the Internet, or a connection over any otherdistributed processing network or system.

It should also be appreciated that the document data may be a scannedimage of a physical document or a photograph, or a document typedelectronically using any software, such as word processing software, ora document created using any known programming language or software. Thedocument may also be the contents of an application window on a user'sdesktop, e.g., the toolbars, window decorations, and spreadsheet shownin a spreadsheet program. The data source 100 is thus any known or laterdeveloped device which is capable of supplying electronic data over thelink 110 to the enhanced thumbnail system 200. The link 110 can thus beany known or later developed system or device for transmitting theelectronic data from the data source 100 to the enhanced thumbnailsystem 200.

The data sink 300 can be any device that is capable of outputting orstoring the process image data generated according to the system andmethods according to this invention, such as a printer, a copier orother image forming device, a facsimile device, a display device, amemory, or the like. In preferred embodiments, the data sink is adisplay device, such as a computer monitor or the like. The link 310 canbe any known or later developed device or system for connecting the datasink 300 to the enhanced thumbnail system 200, including a direct cableconnection, a connection over a wide area network or local area network,a connection over an intranet, a connection over the internet, or aconnection over any other distributed processing network or system.

As shown in FIG. 1, the enhanced thumbnail system 200 includes acontroller 210, an enhanced thumbnail generator 220, an input/outputinterface 230, a browser 240, a user input device 250, a memory 260, anenhancement retention system 270 and a click-through system 280, all ofwhich are interconnected via a bus 290.

The controller 210 controls the operation of other components of theenhanced thumbnail generator 200, performs any necessary calculationsand executes any necessary programs for generating enhanced thumbnails,and controls the flow of data between other components of the enhancedthumbnail generator 200 as needed. The enhanced thumbnail generator 220generates enhanced thumbnails, as described in detail below.

The enhanced thumbnail generator 200 may implement a program written inany suitable programming language and may utilize a component Webbrowser. For example, a generator which is a program written in the Javaprogramming language and utilizes a component browser 240, such as theICE Browser, made by WindRiver, is suitable for use in the enhancedthumbnail generating system 200. The browser 240 provides access todocuments when documents are to be retrieved from a distributeddatabase, such as the Internet. The browser 240, such as the ICEbrowser, may also provide a rendered version of the document. That is,the browser 240 could also provide a full-size or thumbnail image of thedocument in accordance with the document format and the importantelement or elements to be extracted.

The input/output interface 230 is an interface for the data source 100and data sink 300 which are connected via the links 110 and 310,respectively.

The user input device 250 is an input device that allows the user toenter information for requesting document retrievals, database searches,or the like. For example, the user input device 250 may be or include akeyboard, mouse, touch screen panel, voice recognition/based inputdevice and/or the like.

The memory 260 may serve as a buffer for information coming into orgoing out of the enhanced thumbnail generator 200, may store anynecessary programs and/or data for implementing the functions of theenhanced thumbnail generator 200, and/or may store data and/or enhancedthumbnails at various stages of processing.

The enhancement retention system 270 may be provided for display of adocument version that is more similar to the thumbnail than the originaldocument for which the thumbnail was generated. For example, theenhancement retention system 270 may retain modified versions ofdocument elements that have been modified from the original documentversion during generation of a thumbnail, or otherwise retain appearancecharacteristics of a thumbnail that are different from correspondingappearance characteristics in the original document. Therefore, when auser requests display of a document corresponding to the thumbnail, adocument version may be displayed that has appearance characteristicssimilar to those of the thumbnail. This helps the user to quickly locatethe elements as they appeared in the thumbnail. If desired, theenhancement retention system 270 returns the modified elements back tothe original format after a predetermined period of time has elapsed orwhen instructed by the user via the user input device 250. The return tothe original format may be direct. Alternatively, the return may be instages. For example, one or more intermediate versions of the document,each successively closer to the original document in appearance, may bedisplayed. It is also possible to stop at one of these intermediateversions, never going to the original document.

The click-through system 280 may be provided to allow a user to directlyview a document or document portion associated with a selectable elementin the thumbnail, without first viewing the original document associatedwith the thumbnail. The click-through system 280 allows the user to jumpto a part of a document corresponding to a thumbnail, or to anotherdocument associated with a selectable element of the original documentassociated with the thumbnail, by clicking a selectable element on thethumbnail. That is, if the user selects a selectable element of thethumbnail by, for example positioning a cursor on the selectable elementwith a mouse and clicking or double-clicking a specified mouse button,the click-through system 280 causes a part of the original documentcorresponding to the clicked selectable element to be directlydisplayed, without first displaying the first page or screen of theoriginal document. In addition, if the thumbnail contains a selectableelement that is a hyperlink to another document, the click-throughsystem 280 causes the hyperlinked document to be directly displayedwithout first displaying the original document.

If desired, the thumbnail may be displayed concurrently with a document.For example, if a document is retrieved by “clicking through” thethumbnail, the thumbnail (or a different thumbnail) may be displayedconcurrently with the document, thus allowing the user to “clickthrough” to another document or to another portion of the currentlydisplayed document. Furthermore, it should be appreciated that theclick-through feature may be combined with the above-describedenhancement retention feature. For example, a document retrieved by theclick-through procedure may be displayed with modifications similar tomodifications present in the thumbnail.

In FIG. 1, alterable portions of the memory 260 are, in variousexemplary embodiments, implemented using static or dynamic RAM. However,the memory 260 can also be implemented using a floppy disk and diskdrive, a writeable optical disk and disk drive, a hard drive, flashmemory or the like. In FIG. 1, the generally static portions of thememory 260 are, in various exemplary embodiments, implemented using ROM.However, the static portions can also be implemented using othernon-volatile memory, such as PROM, EPROM, EEPROM, an optical ROM disk,such as a CD-ROM or DVD-ROM, and disk drive, flash memory or otheralterable memory, as indicated above, or the like.

As shown in FIG. 2, the enhanced thumbnail generator 220 may include adocument format modifier 222, a renderer 224, an image modifier 226, anda visual salience determination system 228. The document format modifier222 modifies a format of the original document, e.g., a page layout ofthe original document, font sizes used in the original document, colorsused in the original document, and/or the like. The document formatmodifier 222 includes an element extractor 2222 that extracts importantdocument elements, i.e., elements that are useful in identifying,classifying and/or characterizing the documents. For example, importantdocument elements may be or include a document header, words that matchkeywords input by a search request, words or other informationassociated with tags, and/or elements indicated to be relevant by arelevance determination system 2228 as discussed in more detail below.

The document format modifier 222 also includes a data modificationsystem 2224 that modifies document data. Typically, the document data tobe modified includes one or more elements extracted by the elementextractor 2222, although other elements may also or instead be modified.The modification may include changing the size, color, and/or font ofthe extracted elements. Furthermore, the document format modifier 222may include an element location determiner 2226 that determines andstores information related to the position of the element relative tothe document layout as a whole or relative to another element within thedocument extracted by the element extractor 2222.

The relevance determination system 2228 may be provided in the documentformat modifier 222 to evaluate relevance of elements using known orlater developed techniques. For example, the relevance determinationsystem 2228 may identify elements matching keywords input by the user tobe more relevant than words that do not match input keywords, andelements near these elements matching keywords as more relevant thanelements not near elements matching keywordsAs another example, therelevance determination system 2228 may include or have access to a userprofile that indicates a particular user's interests, and then use theinformation in this user profile to identify elements that are mostlikely, and/or least likely, to be of interest to the user. As yetanother example, the relevance determination system 2228 may rely on anyknown or later developed visual attention models to predict whichelements in a document are likely to draw the attention of a user, ormay rely on direct observation of the user through mechanisms such aslogging of the user's actions in the browser or monitoring of the user'seye movements with an eyetracking machine. As a further example, therelevance determination system 2228 may consider the size or color ofthe elements in the original document. The relevance determinationsystem 2228 may analyze each element in a document, or may analyzeelements extracted by the element extractor 2222, for example.

The elements identified as relevant by the relevance determinationsystem 2228 may be output as a simple list, or may be output as anordered list that is prioritized from least-to-most relevant or viceversa, for example. For example, the relevance determination system 2228may determine a relevance value of each relevant element. The relativerelevance of a given element could then be determined by comparison withthe relevance value of other relevant elements. It should be appreciatedthat the relevance determination system may perform a number ofdifferent computations of relevance based on different criteria and thencombine these into a single relevance value for each element, or into asingle ordered list.

The renderer 224 determines the layout of the document if necessary. Forexample, HTML documents typically require interpretation to determinetheir layout. The renderer 224 renders a reduced-size representation ofthe document using any known or later developed image reduction orscaling algorithm. Such scaling might involve simple reduction of thepage. It might also involve changes in the aspect ratio of the page,e.g. an entire or a part of the reduced-size representation of thedocument might be scaled more in the horizontal dimension than in thevertical dimension, or vice versa. Furthermore, the page might bereduced according to distortion-oriented techniques such as fisheyeviews. These distortions could be based on important elements or on theresult of the relevance determination described above; for example,important elements in the document could be proportionally larger thanelements not identified as being important or relevant elements of thedocument.

The image modifier 226 modifies properties of the image output by therenderer 224, and may include a callout generator 2262 that generatescallouts (described in more detail below), a contrast reducer 2264 thatadjusts the contrast of the thumbnail and/or a color modification system2266 that adjusts the color of the thumbnail. The image modifier 226 mayalso include a selectable element generator 2268 that generatesselectable elements in the thumbnail image. The selectable elements maycorrespond to selectable elements that were present in the originaldocument, such as hyperlinks to other documents or to other portions ofthe same document, or to graphics or the like which, when selected by“double-clicking” or the like, are displayed as in an enlarged format.Alternatively or additionally, the selectable element generator 2268 maygenerate selectable elements corresponding to different portions of theoriginal document. For example, if a document includes a plurality ofpages, a plurality of selectable elements may be generated for placementon the thumbnail image such that, when one selectable element isselected, a corresponding page or area of the original document isdisplayed. The selectable elements may, rather than being visiblydiscrete elements, simply be different areas of the thumbnail. In thiscase, each different area may be associated with a positionallycorresponding area of the document. For example, selecting near the topof the thumbnail would retrieve the first page of the document,selecting near the middle of the thumbnail would retrieve anintermediate page of the document, and so forth. It should beappreciated that a page may not only correspond to a physical page in adocument, but may also represent the contents of a given window, e.g.,the contents of a browser or some other application such as aspreadsheet.

The selectable element generator 2268 may, if necessary, generateproportionally large versions of the selectable elements that werepresent in the original document so that the thumbnail image versions ofthe selectable elements are visually distinguishable.

The visual salience determination system 228 determines how to modifythe appearance of elements to achieve certain effects related to theuser's visual attention to the document, for example to optimize theirability to grab attention. Such a determination may be based on simplerules, such as a rule directing a change in font size to 36-point fontfor all relevant elements, a rule to enlarge all relevant elements tothree times their present size, or the like. Such determinations mayalso include preserving the appearance of horizontal and vertical lines,or emphasizing decorations or structure in the original document, e.g.,ensuring that bold elements in the original document look bold in thethumbnail, or emphasizing the lines in tables. The visual saliencedetermination system 228 may operate in conjunction with the relevancedetermination system 2228 to determine different modifications fordifferent elements within a document, based on their relative relevance.For example, the most relevant elements in the document may be enlargedmore than less relevant elements, and/or may be highlighted withdifferent highlight colors. For example, if red is considered a moreattention-grabbing highlight color than yellow, the more relevantelements may be highlighted in red while less relevant elements arehighlighted in yellow. Such color choices may be based on pre-chosenmetrics, or can be dynamically computed based on the color contents of agiven document or set of documents, e.g., the visual saliencedetermination system 228 may choose colors with maximum contrast tothose found in a given document or set of documents. It should beappreciated that colors may be chosen based on or influenced by criteriaother than visual salience. As an example, colors of different calloutsmay be assigned based on the semantic-relatedness of the words theycontain; words that are related semantically can be assigned similarcolors, and words that are not related semantically can be assigneddifferent colors. The visual salience determination system 228 and/orthe relevance determination system 2228 may use information from therenderer 224, if necessary, to implement their respective functions. Itwill be appreciated by those skilled in the art that there are manydifferent criteria that can be used, and various modifications orcombinations of modifications that may be implemented, by the visualsalience determination system 228.

It should be understood by one of ordinary skill in the art that each ofthe elements shown in FIGS. 1 and 2 can be implemented as portions of asuitably programmed general purpose computer. Alternatively, each of thecircuits shown in FIGS. 1 and 2 can be implemented as physicallydistinct hardware circuits within an ASIC, or using a FPGA, a PDL, a PLAor a PAL, or using discrete logic elements or discrete circuit elements.Furthermore, it should be appreciated that any number of the discreteelements shown in FIGS. 1 and 2 may be combined into a single entity,and that any element shown as a single entity may be implemented by aplurality of separate elements. For example, one logical combination isfor the browser 240 to implement the function of the element locationdeterminer 2226. The particular form each of the elements shown in FIGS.1 and 2 will take is a design choice and will be obvious and predictableto those skilled in the art. Furthermore, it should be appreciated that,in embodiments, one or more of the above-described elements may beomitted. For example, when a click-through feature is not necessary ordesired, the click-through system 280 may be omitted; when theenhancement retention feature is not necessary or desired, theenhancement retention system 270 may be omitted; if relevancedeterminations are not necessary, the relevance determination system2228 may be omitted, etc.

As an example of an operation of the above-described system, a userrequests document retrieval via the user input device 250. The requestmay indicate particular documents, such as particular documents storedin a database, e.g., a computer hard drive, network server, emailprogram, or the like. The request may indicate a location of aparticular document on the Internet, for example, such as a UniformResource Locator (URL), or may specify search parameters, such as one ormore key-words or phrases relating to the content for which the user isparticularly searching. The request may be a request to any known orlater developed search engine to search for documents containing keywords or phrases specified by the user. The controller 210 receives therequest from the user via the bus 270. If necessary, the controller 210translates the user request into a command for a search engine, such asa command in the Structured Query Language (SQL), or an HTTP GETrequest.Document information is then retrieved from the data source 100 over thelink 110, via the input/output interface 230, in accordance with therequest.

The retrieved document information is input to the enhanced thumbnailgenerator 200. The document information is made accessible to thedocument format modifier 222 in the enhanced thumbnail generating system220.

The element extractor 2222 of the document format modifier 222 readsinformation of each document sent from the data source 100 andidentifies and extracts important elements in the document, such as theheader of the document, key words, and/or words or features associatedwith certain tags. For example, if the document is written in HypertextMarkup Language (HTML), <H1> and <H2> tags, which specify the size oftext enclosed by the tags, may be considered important elements. Itshould be appreciated that the extracted elements can be metadata forthe document, such as the URL of an HTML document. Before, after orduring the extraction, or as part of the extraction, the relevancedetermination system 2228 may evaluate and indicate relevance of anelement, either as an absolute measure of relevance or in terms ofrelevance relative to other elements.

In addition, the creator of the document may have tagged certainelements of the document as important elements. For example, thedocument creator may consider certain words or other elements of thedocument to be particularly important, and may wish to ensure that theseelements appear in a subsequently created enhanced thumbnail image.Thus, the document creator may associate the important words or otherelements with tags that will be recognized by the element extractor2222.

The data modification system 2224 in the document format modifier 222may then modify the document to adjust the important elements identifiedby the element extractor 2222, and/or other elements, such that theelements will have a modified visual appearance. As described earlier,this visual appearance may be specified by the user, or determined byany known or later developed method. The visual salience determinationsystem 228 may send information regarding the user-specified visualappearance to the data modification system 2224.

For example, the data modification system 2224 may modify key wordsand/or words that appear in the header by enlarging the words so that,when they are subsequently reduced for placement in a thumbnail, theywill still be readable. Modifications may also include changing thecolor and/or the font type of text and other elements. Such size, colorand/or font type changes may be specified by the user or preset in theenhanced thumbnail generator 200.

Moreover, such sizes, color and/or font type may be changed based on therelevance of the important elements determined by the relevancedetermination system 2228. For instance, more relevant elements may bemodified such that they appear larger and/or in different colors ofhighlighting than less relevant elements.

The element location determiner 2226 may determine the location of theextracted words or elements, and/or of one or more non-extractedelements. This location information may be stored in the memory 260 andmay, for example indicate an X-Y coordinate in the document. On theother hand, for certain types of documents, such as documents written inHTML, the appearance of the document may vary depending on the systemused to view the document, or the assumed size and aspect ratio of thewindow that might display the document. In this case, the elementlocation determiner 2226 may determine an X-Y coordinate of the elementwith respect to the appearance of the document in that system. Thelocation information may be used by the image modifier 226, as describedin more detail below.

The renderer 224 then renders a reduced representation of the modifieddocument. For example, the document may be reduced to a 200 pixel×200pixel image. The reduced-size representation may be an image of thefirst page of the document or any specified view within the document.The reduced-size representation may be rendered using any of a number ofknown or later developed methods for creating a reduced-sizerepresentation, or may be rendered in a distorted manner as describedabove.

The image modifier 226 may then modify properties of the reduced-sizerepresentation. The image modifier 226 may implement one or moretransformations that are not expressed in the original document.

The image modifier 226 may use information obtained by the documentformat modifier 222, such as identifications of important elementsand/or the location of one or more elements. For example, a keyword thathas been identified by the element extractor 2222 of the document formatmodifier 222 and the position of the keyword that is determined by theelement location determiner 2226 may be the basis for a transformationby the image modifier 226. Alternatively, the image modifier 226 mayindependently identify elements or characteristics to modify. Forexample, the image modifier 226 may modify contrast or color of theimage independent of any information obtained by the document formatmodifier 222.

One useful transformation is to render text phrases as callouts, whichare enlarged text overlays, on top of or next to the reduced-sizerepresentation. In this technique, the callout generator 2262 identifiesa word or word phrase, a scale factor at which to re-render the word orword phrase, and optionally an alignment parameter, based on theinformation from the element location determiner for positioning thecallout relative to the original position of the word or word phrase ofthe document. The callout generator 2262 generates, for example, anenlarged version of the word or word phrase and graphically overlays theenlarged version of the word or word phrase on top of the thumbnail,thus allowing the user to more easily recognize the specified word,words or phrases in the thumbnail. It should be appreciated that acallout generated by the callout generator 2262 may have a differentappearance than, for example, a word that has been modified by the datamodification system 2224 of the document format modifier 222. An exampleof this difference can be seen in FIGS. 4 and 5. FIG. 4 shows athumbnail in which the words in the header have been enlarged by thedata modification system 2224. In contrast, FIG. 5 shows an example ofthe thumbnail in which, along with the modification by the datamodification system 2224, a callout has also been generated and overlaidby the callout generator 2262. Specifically, the words “recipe” and“pound cake” have been overlaid as callouts in FIG. 5. It should also beappreciated that the text (or other elements) may either have the sameproperties as in the original document, or some or all differentproperties, e.g., color or font may be changed. Further, imagetransformations can be applied to these elements, e.g., text can be madeblurry or shown in perspective, as in FIGS. 22-23. A callout may be anelement that does not bear any resemblance to an element with which itis associated. For example, as shown in FIG. 25, callouts may be in theform of arrows overlaid on or near the thumbnail to draw attention toanother element.

Other transformations are also possible. For example, a color wash maybe applied. A color wash is any change in color applied throughout theimage, e.g. through the overlay of a transparent layer on the image suchthat the original image remains visible but the color of the image as awhole has been modified by the color of the overlay. A color wash isuseful as described below. The more saturated the color of an elementrelative to the surrounding colors, the more it tends to draw attention.The contrast modifier 2264 may change the contrast of the reduced-sizerepresentation by applying a white color wash such that the reduced-sizerepresentation is made more white, or desaturated. This technique makesthe callouts overlaid by the callout generator 2262 stand out better andbetter draw the user's attention.

As another example, the color of the reduced-size representation may bemodified by the color modification system 2266 and/or the datamodification system 2224. For example, the color of certain words orother elements, or the entire area or some areas of the reduced-sizerepresentation, may be changed so that the overall appearance of theimage may be different from that of other thumbnails to better catch theattention of the user. For instance, based on the relevance elementsdetermined by the relevance determination system 2228, if there is ahigh frequency of the words or phrases specified by the user in thedocument, a light pink color wash might be applied to the thumbnail,indicating to the user that the document may be highly related to thesubject matter the user is interested in.

Color choice may be predefined, possibly based on user preference.Alternatively, color choice may be dynamically determined based on thecolor content of a document or a given set of documents, e.g., to selectcolors with maximum contrast to pre-existing colors in the document orset of documents.

Another effective way to draw attention to elements is to put them in aseparate visual layer. When elements are in a separate visual layer fromthe original document, they stand out, thereby drawing the user'sattention. Further, the user can selectively attend to the differentlayers.

For instance, alpha-blending the overlay highlight color of the calloutswith the background—i.e., mixing the background image with the overlayhighlight color such that the result is a combination of the two, withthe alpha value determining the weighting of the combination—creates asemi-transparent overlay, occludes less of the page and in additionprovides a strong cue that the callouts are additions to the pages. Itshould be appreciated that different parts of the callout may or may notbe semi-transparent, e.g., in a given callout, text may benon-transparent while the overlay highlight color is semi-transparent.

One standard method of alpha-blending creates a new image (C_(new)) froma background image (C_(old)) and an overlay image (Overlay) by using thefollowing equation:C _(new)(x,y)=α Overlay(x,y)+(1−α)C _(old)(x,y)

For example, if the alpha value (α) is 0.4, the resulting image is amixture of 40% of the overlay highlight color with 60% of the backgroundimage, alpha values of around 0.5 are preferable for the overlayhighlight color, though the alpha value can take on any value between0.0 and 1.0.

Modified thumbnail images are sent to the data sink 300. Alternatively,data for modifying a pre-existing thumbnail could be sent to the datasink 300 to modify thumbnails that are already present in the data sink300.

Some specific exemplary operations are described below.

In a first example, a user is searching for recipes for pound cake. As asearch request, the user enters the keywords “recipe” and “pound cake”and sends this request to the enhanced thumbnail generator 200 via theuser input device 250. Based on the request, the controller 210retrieves documents from the data source 100, via the browser 240 ifnecessary. It should be appreciated that the documents may be acollection of documents that are newly assembled in response to therequest, such as in the case of Internet searching/retrieval, apre-existing collection of documents stored in a local server, harddrive, floppy disk, or the like, or any combination or variationthereof.

After retrieving a document, for example, the document represented inFIG. 3, the document format modifier 222 modifies the appearance of oneor more elements. That is, the element extractor 2222 extracts importantelements of the document, such as the header, and the location of theelement is determined by the element location determiner 2226. In thisexample, the words of the header, i.e., “Mansfield PlantationGeorgetown, S.C. Heritage Recipe, Mom's Chocolate Pound Cake”, areenlarged by the data modification system 2224 such that they arereadable when rendered in a reduced-size representation. Additionally,the words of the documents that match the key words input by the userare highlighted. If desired, the user may specify the highlight color.For example, the user might specify that each instance of the wordsrecipe and pound cake should be highlighted. These words may behighlighted in different colors if desired. Moreover, if desired, thesize, color and/or font type may be modified differently depending ontheir relevance as determined by the relevance determination system2228.

After such modification, the renderer 224 renders a reducedrepresentation of the document.

If desired, the image modifier 226 may modify the reduced-sizerepresentation as described above. For example, as seen in FIG. 5, thespecified words are expressed using callouts. That is, the specifiedwords are enlarged, and optionally highlighted, and are overlaid on topof the thumbnail. The position in the document may be based on locationinformation determined by the element location determiner 2226. Ifdesired, the image modifier 226 may also adjust the position of calloutssuch that no callouts overlap each other.

If the image modifier 226 determines that not all of the callouts canfit in one thumbnail, the image modifier 226 may enlarge the thumbnailor reduce the number of callouts based on their relevance, as determinedby the relevance determination system 2228. For example, the leastrelevant callouts may be omitted, duplicates may be omitted, or thelike.

Sometimes the callout word or phrase exceeds the outside edge of thethumbnail, such as the phrase Pound Cake in FIG. 5. That is, the phrasePound Cake, when enlarged as a callout, is too large to fit within theboundaries of the thumbnail. The system may support various “spillrules” that allows the callout to extend over the edge of the reducedpage image so that no part of the callout phrase extending beyond theedge is cut, or specifying that the original thumbnail size be retained,cutting the extending callout part to be removed. The position of thecallout might also be adjusted so that no part of the callout extendsover the boundary of the thumbnail. The spill rules may be defined bythe user or predefined in the enhanced thumbnail generator 200. Thespill rules may include reducing size of the callout such that the widthand/or height of the callout fits in the thumbnail image. Regardless ofthe position of the callouts, certain visual cues (e.g., those shown inFIGS. 19-20) may be used to indicate the spatial relationship betweenthe location of the word in the original thumbnail and the position ofthe callout.

A thumbnail may, rather than being a static image, be animated todynamically show content. For example, when mouse-over occurs, i.e.,when a user positions an on-screen cursor over the thumbnail using amouse or the like, the thumbnail may show important elements as flashingdisplays, scrolling displays, displays with continuously changing color,or the like. If there are more important elements in a document than canbe shown in the thumbnail at one time, these important elements may bedisplayed in turn, randomly or in succession, for example.

Other examples of enhanced thumbnails applied to various documents aredescribed using FIGS. 6-10. It should be appreciated that the thumbnailsshown in FIGS. 6-10 are not to scale; they are shown larger than theywould ordinarily appear on a display screen such as a computer monitor.

FIG. 6 is an example of an enhanced thumbnail for an e-commercedocument. In this example, the user may be able to locate a name of aproduct (i.e., MiniDisc Player in this example) to help the useridentify the document without viewing the actual document.

FIG. 7 is an example of an enhanced thumbnail for a news document. Theuser can rapidly search information from a plurality of news articles byskimming the thumbnails containing enlarged words or phrases. In thiscase, the user may be able to specify the words and/or the color of thecallouts that appear on the thumbnail.

FIG. 8 is an example of an enhanced thumbnail for a homepage. In thiscase, the name of the homepage owner is enlarged, and overlaid on thethumbnail as a highlighted callout.

FIGS. 9 and 10 are examples of thumbnails for normal text documents.FIG. 9 shows a conventional thumbnail image which is created simply byreducing the size of the document. It can be appreciated that it isextremely hard to gain an idea of what kind of document this is. On theother hand, using an enhanced thumbnail, as shown in FIG. 10, sincespecified words are enlarged and colored, the user is able to grasp thecontent of the document more easily.

It should be appreciated that the reduced-size representation does notnecessarily need to be modified by the image modifier 226. For example,if the modifications made by the data modification system 2224 aresufficient to allow easy readability of the important elements in thethumbnail, further modification by the image modifier 226 may beunnecessary. Thus, in embodiments, the image modifier 226 itself may beunnecessary. Conversely, modifications by the data modification system2224 may not always be necessary, if the modifications made by the imagemodifier 226 are sufficient to allow easy readability, identification,or classification of the thumbnail. For example, when callouts aregenerated by the callout generator 2262, modifications by the datamodification system 2224 may be unnecessary. Thus, in embodiments, thedata modification system 2224 and/or the element location determiner2226 may be unnecessary.

FIG. 11 is a flowchart depicting one exemplary method of creating anenhanced thumbnail.

Beginning at step S1100, the process continues to step S1150 and obtainsa document. The method then continues to step S1200. At step S1200,important elements of the document, such as the header, keywords, wordsor the like are identified, and the process then continues to stepS1250. At step S1250, location information of one or more elements,which may or may not include the important elements identified in stepS1200, is stored.

Next, in step S1300, it is determined whether one or more documentformat elements are to be modified. If document format elements are tobe modified, the process moves to step S1350. Otherwise, the processjumps to step S1400.

At step S1350, the document format elements are modified, and theprocess continues to step S1400. At step S1400, a reduced-sizerepresentation of the document is created. Next, in step S1400, it isdetermined whether the reduced-size representation needs to be modified.If the reduced-size representation needs to be modified, the processcontinues to step S1500. Otherwise, the process jumps to step S1550.

At step S1500, one or more elements of the reduced-size representationare modified. For example, a callout may be applied on top of thethumbnail, and/or contrast and/or color of the image may be modified.Then, in step S1550, the enhanced thumbnail image is output, and theprocess then ends at step S1600.

In embodiments, one or more of the above-described steps may be omitted.For example, it may not be necessary to perform step S1250 if imagemodification is not to be performed, or if the image modification to beperformed does not rely on element position information. If only imagemodification, such a callout or the like, is to be performed and nodocument format modifications are necessary, steps S1300 and S1350 maybe omitted. Likewise, if only document format modifications are to beperformed, steps S1450 and S1500 may be omitted.

Experiments have shown that the time that is required for a user toreview a collection of documents is reduced by at least 20% with theenhanced thumbnail images, compared to reviewing conventional resultsfrom search engines.

To obtain even further benefit from enhanced thumbnail image, theenhancements, i.e., the data and/or image modifications presented in thethumbnail image, may be retained when a document associated with thethumbnail image is displayed. FIGS. 12-14 show an example. That is, FIG.12 shows an original document. FIG. 13 shows an enhanced thumbnail thathas been created based on the document. FIG. 14 shows a document versionthat is displayed when a user requests display of a document associatedwith the thumbnail by, for example, mouse-clicking the thumbnail.

When the enhanced thumbnail shown in FIG. 13 is created, the words“Xerox” and Products are designated as important elements and aretherefore enlarged to gain the user's attention. When a user requestsdisplay of a document associated with the thumbnail by, for example,mouse-clicking on the thumbnail, the enhancement retention system 270temporarily or permanently displays a document with modificationscorresponding to all or some of the modified elements of the thumbnailimage. Specifically, in this example, as shown in FIG. 14, the displayeddocument version, like the thumbnail, has the words “Xerox” and“Products” enlarged.

In this example, an advantage of going from the thumbnail shown in FIG.13 to the document version shown in FIG. 14 is that the user can moreeasily identify relevant portions of a document, and avoid becomingdisoriented in the transition from the thumbnail to the document,because the same elements that attracted the user's attention in thethumbnail image will attract the user's attention in the documentassociated with the image. If desired, the enhancement retention system270 may display the document in its original format, i.e., without theenhancements, when requested by the user (e.g., by clicking a specifiedbutton on a mouse, by selecting a specified selectable element on adisplay screen, or the like) or after a predetermined period of time haselapsed, for example.

This invention may also apply to thumbnails which are not modified withenhancements as described above, but which otherwise have one or moreappearance characteristics that are different from the originaldocument. In other words, the different appearance characteristics ofthe thumbnail may be retained, either permanently or temporarily, whendisplaying a document associated with the thumbnail image. Thus, theabove-described enhancement retention may apply to documents associatedwith thumbnails generated using any known or later developed methods,including but not limited to the above-described methods.

FIG. 15 is a flowchart depicting a first exemplary method of enhancementretention. The process starts at step S5000 and continues to step S5100,where a thumbnail is displayed. In step S5200, it is determined whethera request has been received to display a document associated with thethumbnail. If a request has been received, the process continues to stepS5300. Otherwise, step S5200 is repeated until a request has beenreceived.

In step S5300, a document version more similar in appearance to thethumbnail than the original document is displayed. The process thencontinues to step S5400. In step S5400, it is determined whether arequest has been received to display another document version moresimilar in appearance to the original document than the thumbnail image.If the request has been received, the process continues to step S5500.Otherwise, the process repeats step S5400. It can be appreciated that ifa request is never received in step S5400, the process effectively endsat step S5400.

In step S5500, a document version is displayed that is more similar inappearance to the original document than the previously displayedversion. It should be appreciated that the transition from thepreviously displayed version to the currently displayed version mayinvolve an animation or morphing from one version to the other, or anyof a number of known visual effects. It should also be appreciated thatthe document version that is more similar to the original document mayactually be identical to the original document. The process thencontinues to step S5600, where it is determined whether the currentlydisplayed document version is identical to the original document. If thecurrent version is not identical, the process returns to step S5400 andrepeats steps S5400-S5600. If the current version is identical to theoriginal document, the process continues to step S5700 and ends.

FIG. 16 is a flowchart depicting a second exemplary method ofenhancement retention. In this flowchart, steps S6000-S6300 andS6500-S6700 are the same as steps S5000-S5300 and S5500-S5600 of theflowchart shown in FIG. 15. Thus, descriptions of these steps areomitted.

In step S6400, it is determined whether a predetermined time period haselapsed. If the predetermined time period has elapsed, the process movesto step S6500, otherwise the process repeats step S6400. Thus, ratherthan requiring a user request to display a document version moresimilar, or identical, to the original document, the identical ormore-similar document is automatically displayed after a predeterminedtime period such as two second, five seconds, or any other suitable timeperiod. The predetermined time period is preferably just long enough toallow the user to visually locate the important elements in thedocument. An unnecessarily long period may impede the user's access todocument details surrounding the important element(s).

FIGS. 12, 13 and 17 illustrate an example of a click-through procedurethat may be implemented using the click-through system 280 of FIG. 1.The click-through procedure allows a user quicker access to desiredcontent. To implement the click-through procedure, a thumbnail with oneor more selectable elements is generated using the selectable elementgenerator 2268 of FIG. 2. For example, the thumbnail of FIG. 13 isgenerated based on the original document of FIG. 12. In this example,the word “products” in the original document of FIG. 12 is a selectableelement which, when selected by mouse-clicking or the like, causesanother document, shown in FIG. 17, to be displayed.

To enable the click-through procedure, when the thumbnail of FIG. 13 isgenerated, the word “products” in the thumbnail is also displayed as aselectable element. In FIG. 13, the selectable element “products” isenlarged relative to other elements in the thumbnail, in order to bemore visible. However, it should be appreciated that a selectableelement in a thumbnail does not necessarily need to be enlarged relativeto surrounding elements, provided that it is visually distinguishable asselectable element and/or large enough for a user to select by, forexample, mouse-clicking.

When the user selects the selectable element “products” in FIG. 13, thedisplay jumps to the document shown in FIG. 17. Thus, the user maydirectly access the content of the document shown in FIG. 17, just as ifhe or she had selected the corresponding selectable element of thedocument shown in FIG. 12. The difference is that the step of firstdisplaying the original document has been eliminated. If the user wishesto view the original document, rather than jumping directly to anotherdocument, the user may do so by clicking a portion of the thumbnailother than a selectable element, or by making another user interfacegesture, such as clicking while pressing a specified mouse buttonanywhere on the thumbnail, including on a selectable element.

The click-through procedure may also be applied using a thumbnailgenerated based on an original document without selectable elements. Inthis case, the thumbnail may be provided with selectable elements which,rather than corresponding to selectable elements of the originaldocument, correspond to different areas of the document. As discussedabove, the selectable elements need not be visibly discrete elements,but may simply be different areas of the thumbnail. For example,selecting near the top of the thumbnail by mouse-clicking or the likewould cause the first page of the document to be displayed, etc.However, a direct positional correlation between the selectable elementsand the corresponding areas of the document is not required. Forexample, if the original document is a four-page document, the thumbnailmay be provided with four selectable elements, each corresponding to adifferent page. The thumbnail may be partitioned into an upper leftsection, an upper right section, a lower left section and a lower rightsection. When a user mouse-clicks the upper left section, the first pagemay be displayed; mouse-clicking the upper right section may result inthe second page being displayed; and so forth.

FIG. 18 is a flowchart depicting an exemplary method of enabling aclick-through procedure. The process starts at step S7000 and continuesto step S7100, where a thumbnail image with one or more selectableelements is displayed. The process then continues to step S7200. In stepS7200, it is determined whether a selectable element on the thumbnailhas been selected. If a selectable element has been selected, theprocess continues to step S7300. Otherwise, the process jumps to stepS7400.

In step S7300, a document or document portion associated with theselected selectable element is displayed, and the process jumps to stepS7600.

In step S7400, it is determined whether the entire thumbnail image hasbeen selected. If the entire thumbnail image has been selected, theprocess continues to step S7500. Otherwise, the process returns to stepS7200.

In step S7500, an original document associated with the thumbnail imageis displayed, and the process then ends in step S7600.

FIGS. 19-31 show additional examples of enhancements that may beprovided on enhanced thumbnails. These enhancements may be performed bythe document format modifier 222 and/or the image modifier 226.

FIG. 19 shows that a modified element, e.g., the phrase DIGITAL COPIER,appears to zoom from the thumbnail. The direction of the zoom may bespecified by the user or may be predetermined by the system. The colorof the zoom may be specified by the user or may be changed based on therelevance of the element.

FIG. 20 shows another type of zoom effect. In this case, the phraseDIGITAL COPIER appears multiple times, with each successive appearanceof the phrase offset from the previous appearance and having a differentsize.

FIG. 21 shows a thumbnail having callouts “Xerox” and “Products” locatedoutside of the thumbnail image, with arrows 400 connecting the calloutsand the location of the corresponding elements in the thumbnail. Thiseffect allows the user to view the thumbnail and callouts without thecallouts obscuring significant portions of the thumbnail background.

FIGS. 22 and 23 show different image transformations of text. FIG. 22shows a transformation in which blurry text is generated for the word“Concorde”. FIG. 22 shows a transformation in which perspective text isgenerated for the word “Concorde”.

FIG. 24 shows a thumbnail on which a callout has been overlaid thatoccupies substantially the entire thumbnail. FIG. 25 shows a thumbnailin which important elements are indicated by arrows 500.

FIGS. 26 and 27 show examples of enhanced thumbnails that areparticularly useful in cases in which the original document may berather long and/or wide. For example, many web pages are often lengthyin one direction, e.g. in the vertical direction. In that case, as shownin FIG. 26, the renderer 224 may generate a reduced representation ofthe entire document, and enhancements may be applied as described above.The thumbnail shown in FIG. 27 has scroll bars 600 which a user mayoperate in known fashion, and which allow the user to scroll todifferent parts of the thumbnail corresponding to different parts of theoriginal document associated with the thumbnail, and which additionallyindicate how much of the entire document is being displayed in thethumbnail.

FIGS. 28-31 illustrate how callouts may be changed depending on the sizeof the thumbnail image. FIGS. 28-31 show thumbnails of successivelydecreasing sizes. These figures may illustrate different sizes ofthumbnail that may be generated by the enhanced thumbnail generator 220,or may illustrate a variable size thumbnail that may be enlarged orreduced by a user. For example, the user may change the size of athumbnail from the size shown in FIG. 28 to the size shown in FIG. 29,then to the size shown in FIG. 30, and finally to the size shown in FIG.31.

In FIG. 28, the words “Antz”, “movie” and “poster” are displayed asmodified elements. In FIG. 29, the same words are displayed, but theword “poster” is not as large as in FIG. 28. This may be, for example,because the word “poster” has been determined to be less relevant thanthe other words, and/or because it will not fit within the boundaries ofthe thumbnail unless thus reduced.

In FIG. 30, the words “poster” is no longer displayed as a callout, andthe other callouts are somewhat reduced in size so that they will fit onthe thumbnail. In FIG. 31, only the words “Antz” remains as a callout.

This invention is not limited to the above described methods andapparatus. One of ordinary skill in the art would understand that manydifferent modifications are possible without departing from the scope ofthe invention.

For example, in the examples described above, callouts are positioneddirectly above the word with which they are associated in the thumbnail.However, it may be desirable to slightly adjust the position of thecallouts so as to minimize their occlusion of each other or of otheruseful information on the thumbnail such as readable headers. Anotheralternative is to include the text in only one callout per thumbnail andrender the other callouts as colored bands only, giving the user a senseof the distribution of the word in the page without cluttering it withtext. For example, if the words “recipe” and “pound cake” are used askeywords, as in one of the above-described examples, ayellow-highlighted callout with the text “recipe” may be renderedcorresponding to one of the occurrences of the word “recipe” in thedocument, and callouts including yellow bands only may be overlaid onother occurrences of the word “recipe”. Similarly, one red-highlightedcallout with the text “pound cake” may be rendered for one occurrence ofthe phrase “pound cake”, and callouts including red bands only may berendered for other occurrences of the phrase “pound cake”. If necessary,the callouts without text may be smaller, so as to cover less of, andadd less clutter to, the thumbnail.

Additionally, those skilled In the art will recognize many applicationsfor the present invention, including but not limited to display devicessuch as file browser devices, email browsers, hierarchy browsers,systems that display thumbnails of applications of a personal computer,handheld devices, and the like. In short, the invention has applicationto any known or later developed system or device capable of using plainthumbnails.

1. A method of generating a thumbnail, comprising: generating a reduced-size representation of an original document, the original document having at least one first selectable element, each at least one first selectable element having, as an associated destination, one of (a) an arbitrary portion of the original document accessible by selection of a second selectable element provided in the original document and (b) a document other than the original document; generating at least one second selectable element, each at least one second selectable element corresponding to an associated destination of one of the at least one first selectable element; and associating the at least one second selectable element with the reduced-size representation in a display of the reduced-size representation, whereby the one of (a) the one of the document areas and (b) the associated destination of the one of the at least one first selectable element is directly accessible by selection of the one of the at least one second selectable element, wherein the at least one second selectable element has a modified proportionally larger appearance relative to an appearance of a corresponding element in the original document to make the at least one second selectable element have enhanced visual cues for selection.
 2. The method according to claim 1, wherein the at least one second selectable element is a visibly discrete element.
 3. The method according to claim 1, wherein the reduced-size representation is a reduced image.
 4. The method according to claim 1, wherein generating the at least one second selectable element comprises generating a plurality of second selectable elements.
 5. A method of generating a thumbnail, comprising: rendering a reduced image of an original document, the original document having at least one first selectable element, each at least one first selectable element having, as an associated destination, one of (a) an arbitrary portion of the original document accessible by selection of a second selectable element provided in the original document and (b) a document other than the original document; generating at least one second selectable element, each at least one second selectable element corresponding to an associated destination of one of the at least one first selectable element; and associating the at least one second selectable element with the reduced image in a display of the reduced image, whereby the one of (a) the one of the document areas and (b) the associated destination of the one of the at least one first selectable element is directly accessible by selection of the one of the at least one second selectable element, wherein the at least one second selectable element has a modified proportionally larger appearance relative to an appearance of a corresponding element in the original document to make the at least one second selectable element have enhanced visual cues for selection.
 6. A method of generating a thumbnail, comprising: generating a reduced-size representation of an original document, the original document having a plurality of document portions, smaller than the original document and not uniquely associated with any first selectable element provided in the original document, the reduced-size representation having at least one element with a modified proportionally larger appearance relative to an appearance of a corresponding element in the original document to make the at least one element have enhanced visual cues for selection; generating at least one second selectable element, each second selectable element corresponding to one of the plurality of document portions, each at least one second selectable element having, as an associated destination, one of the plurality of document portions; and associating the at least one second selectable element with the reduced-size representation in a display of the reduced-size representation, whereby the one of the document portions is directly accessible by selection of the one of the at least one second selectable element, wherein the at least one element with a modified appearance is the at least one second selectable element.
 7. The method according to claim 6, wherein the at least one second selectable element is not a visibly discrete element.
 8. The method according to claim 6, wherein the reduced-size representation is a reduced image.
 9. The method according to claim 6, wherein generating the at least one second selectable element comprises generating a plurality of second selectable elements.
 10. A method of generating a thumbnail, comprising: rendering a reduced image of an original document, the original document having a plurality of document portions, smaller than the original document and not uniquely associated with any first selectable element provided in the original document, the reduced image having at least one element with a modified proportionally larger appearance relative to an appearance of a corresponding element in the original document to make the at least one element have enhanced visual cues for selection; generating at least one second selectable element, each second selectable element corresponding to one of the plurality of document portions, each at least one second selectable element having, as an associated destination, one of the plurality of document portions; and associating the at least one second selectable element with the reduced image in a display of the reduced image, whereby the one of the document portions is directly accessible by selection of the one of the at least one second selectable element, wherein the at least one element with a modified appearance is the at least one second selectable element.
 11. A system for generating a thumbnail, comprising: a thumbnail generator that generates a reduced-size representation of an original document, the original document having at least one first selectable element, each at least one first selectable element having, as an associated destination, one of(a) an arbitrary portion of the original document accessible by selection of a second selectable element provided in the original document and (b) a document other than the original document; a selectable element generator that generates at least one second selectable element, each at least one second selectable element corresponding to an associated destination of one of the at least one first selectable element; and a controller that associates the at least one second selectable element with the reduced-size representation in a display of the reduced-size representation, whereby the one of (a) the one of the document areas and (b) the associated destination of the one of the at least one first selectable element is directly accessible by selection of the one of the at least one second selectable element, wherein the at least one second selectable element has a modified proportionally larger appearance relative to an appearance of a corresponding element in the original document to make the at least one second selectable element have enhanced visual cues for selection.
 12. The system according to claim 11, wherein the at least one second selectable element is a visibly discrete element.
 13. The system according to claim 11, wherein the reduced-size representation is a reduced image.
 14. The system according to claim 11, wherein the selectable element generator generates a plurality of second selectable elements.
 15. A system for generating a thumbnail, comprising: a renderer that renders a reduced image of an original document, the original document having at least one first selectable element, each at least one first selectable element having, as an associated destination, one of (a) an arbitrary portion of the original document accessible by selection of a second selectable element provided in the original document and (b) a document other than the original document; a selectable element generator that generates at least one second selectable element, each at least one second selectable element corresponding to an associated destination of one of the at least one first selectable element; and a controller that associates the at least one second selectable element with the reduced image in a display of the reduced image, whereby the one of (a) the one of the document areas and (b) the associated destination of the one of the at least one first selectable element is directly accessible by selection of the one of the at least one second selectable element, wherein the at least one second selectable element has a modified proportionally larger appearance relative to an appearance of a corresponding element in the original document to make the at least one second selectable element have enhanced visual cues for selection.
 16. A system for generating a thumbnail, comprising: a thumbnail generator that generates a reduced-size representation of an original document, the original document having a plurality of document portions, smaller than the original document and not uniquely associated with any first selectable element provided in the original document, the reduced-size representation having at least one element with a modified proportionally larger appearance relative to an appearance of a corresponding element in the original document to make the at least one element have enhanced visual cues for selection; a selectable element generator that generates at least one second selectable element, each second selectable element corresponding to one of the plurality of document portions, each at least one second selectable element having, as an associated destination, one of the plurality of document portions; and a controller that associates the at least one second selectable element with the reduced-size representation in a display of the reduced-size representation, whereby the one of the document portions is directly accessible by selection of the one of the at least one second selectable element, wherein the at least one element with an enhanced appearance is the at least one second selectable element.
 17. The system according to claim 16, wherein the at least one second selectable element is not a visibly discrete element.
 18. The system according to claim 16, wherein the reduced-size representation is a reduced image.
 19. The system according to claim 16, wherein generating the at least one second selectable element comprises generating a plurality of second selectable elements.
 20. A system for generating a thumbnail, comprising: a renderer that renders a reduced image of an original document, the original document having a plurality of document portions, smaller than the original document and not uniquely associated with any first selectable element provided in the original document, the reduced image having at least one element with a modified proportionally larger appearance relative to an appearance of a corresponding element in the original document to make the at least one element have enhanced visual cues for selection; a selectable element generator that generates at least one second selectable element, each second selectable element corresponding to one of the plurality of document portions, each at least one second selectable element having, as an associated destination, one of the plurality of document portions; and a controller that associates the at least one second selectable element with the reduced image in a display of the reduced image, whereby the one of the document portions is directly accessible by selection of the one of the at least one second selectable element, wherein the at least one element with an enhanced appearance is the at least one second selectable element.
 21. An information storage medium on which is recorded a program for implementing the steps of claim
 1. 22. An information storage medium on which is recorded a program for implementing the steps of claim
 5. 23. An information storage medium on which is recorded a program for implementing the steps of claim
 6. 24. An information storage medium on which is recorded a program for implementing the steps of claim
 10. 25. The method according to claim 1, wherein the at least one second selectable element includes an enlarged text overlay that overlays the thumbnail.
 26. The method according to claim 5, wherein the at least one second selectable element includes an enlarged text overlay that overlays the thumbnail.
 27. The method according to claim 6, wherein the at least one second selectable element includes an enlarged text overlay that overlays the thumbnail.
 28. The system according to claim 10, wherein the at least one second selectable element includes an enlarged text overlay that overlays the thumbnail.
 29. The system according to claim 11, wherein the at least one second selectable element includes an enlarged text overlay that overlays the thumbnail.
 30. The system according to claim 15, wherein the at least one second selectable element includes an enlarged text overlay that overlays the thumbnail. 